MacTech Blog

Feb 10

IT spending to grow more than 3% through 2020

Worldwide revenues for information technology (IT) products and services are forecast to reach nearly $2.4 trillion in 2017, an increase of 3.5% over 2016, according to IDC. The research group estimates that global IT spending will grow to nearly $2.65 trillion in 2020. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.3% for the 2015-2020 forecast period.

Industry spending on IT products and services will continue to be led by financial services (banking, insurance, and securities and investment services) and manufacturing (discrete and process). Together, these industries will generate around 30% of all IT revenues throughout the forecast period as they invest in technology to advance their digital transformation efforts.

The telecommunications and professional services industries and the federal/central government are also forecast to be among the largest purchasers of IT products and services. The industries that will see the fastest spending growth over...

New research from Juniper Research (www.juniperresearch.com) forecasts that, by 2021, nearly three billion users will access retail banking services via smartphones, tablets, PCs and smartwatches, up 53% from this year.

The research group finds that usage will continue to rise as consumers increasingly opt for banks offering the convenience of rapid, multi-channel digital services. This means that banks will need to focus on providing a more frictionless digital experience to their customers, especially if they are to remain market leaders.

The new research found that while traditional banks have so far remained a step behind in delivering innovation and maintaining their competitive edge against new fintech players, the situation is gradually changing.

“Technology is currently the big differentiator for all types of banks; including traditional banks and the so-called challenger banks...

The worldwide cloud infrastructure services market grew 49% annually, reaching $10.3 billion within the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2016, according to the Canalys (www.canalys.com) research group.

AWS continued to dominate with a 33.8% global market share, while its three nearest competitors – Microsoft, Google and IBM - together accounted for 30.8% of the market. The four leading service providers were followed by Alibaba and Oracle, which made up 2.4% and 1.7% of the total. Canalys forecast the market will hit $55.8 billion in 2017, representing a 46% growth from the total value of $38.1 billion in 2016.

Continuing demand is driving the adoption of cloud infrastructure services, which accelerated the cloud data center expansion among key service providers in Q4 2016. AWS launched 11 new availability zones globally in 2016, four of which were established in Canada and the UK in this quarter. IBM also opened its...

Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com) forecasts that 8.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2017, up 31% from 2016, and will reach 20.4 billion by 2020. Total spending on endpoints and services will reach almost $2 trillion in 2017, according to the research group.

Regionally, Greater China, North America and Western Europe are driving the use of connected things and the three regions together will represent 67% of the overall Internet of Things (IoT) installed base in 2017. The consumer segment is the largest user of connected things with 5.2 billion units in 2017, which represents 63% of the overall number of applications in use. Businesses are on pace to employ 3.1 billion connected things in 2017.

"Aside from automotive systems, the applications that will be most in use by consumers will be smart TVs and digital set-top boxes, while smart electric meters and commercial security...

Global spending via mobile wallets is expected to rise by nearly 32% this year to $1.35 trillion, a new study from Juniper Research (www.juniperresearch.com) has found.

The study found that spending is currently concentrated in the Far East and China, due primarily to the success of Alipay and WeChat. However, the research says that moves by PayPal and Apple to offer wallets that can be used both in-store and online means that wallets will increasingly become the default payment mechanism in other markets.

The research highlights PayPal’s decision to introduce an HCE (Host Card Emulation) NFC solution to enable POS payments as a key disruptive moment in the wallet wars. According to Juniper Research, this – allied to the burgeoning success of its social payments subsidiary Venmo – places PayPal in pole position to capitalize on the increased demand for mobile wallets.

A new study from Juniper Research (www.juniperresearch.com) has found that a gradual change in direction for fitness wearables towards healthcare devices will lead to over 75 million Americans using dedicated activity trackers by 2021, over double the current user base.

The new research has found that this shift in focus will alter consumers’ perception of wearable trackers, making them seem more necessary. Vendors like Fitbit, Withings and Misfit are leading this change, making integration with medical databases a priority and focusing on encouraging users to lead healthier lives, rather than getting “fitter.”

Juniper Research says this will move the wearables battleground from consumer hardware to institutional partnerships and software integration; players who are able to make their devices and systems part of healthcare practices will reap the largest rewards. The research group also...

The Spy (metaphorically) pens this on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2017. Those two are the most commonly misspelled and mispronounced words on the calendar. That's English for you, though. After all there are more than twenty correct pronunciations of the letter combination "ough" in English. No wonder students from other countries have such a tough time learning what we native North Americans absorb and store in our memories from infancy.

Memory and storage have come a long way from the industry's early halcyon days. Students today have never seen a punch card, have no concept of the days when "punch card machine operator" was one of the most sought after skills. The Spy was a somewhat subversive student. He persuaded the computing science department to put one punch machine in the student area, outside the sanctum of the white robed high priests who took our coding sheets, had them punched, ran the programs, and returned...

One in two wireless sensor network (WSN) adopters are using cloud infrastructure for their industrial Internet of Things development, according to a recently published survey by ON World (www.onworld.com), which provides global business intelligence on Internet of Things markets.

"Wireless sensor networks (WSN) is the key technology for connecting billions of Internet of things within the next decade," says Mareca Hatler, ON World's research director. "As early adopters of cloud-based IoT platforms, WSN users are defining industrial IoT solutions as well as picking the winners and losers."
Technologies that communicate up to one mile on average make up the majority of industrial sensor network solutions today.”

But over the next 5-10 years, the fastest growth will come from multi mile low power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies such as LoRa, Sigfox, RPMA, LTE M1 and NB1. These new wireless...

U.S. auto-safety regulators have mandated that new vehicles must communicate with each other through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology beginning in 2020, with the goal of increasing safety.

Vehicles are expected to use the 5.9GHz safety spectrum, which was allocated by the Federal Government to this life-saving technology to ensure that vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications run without interference. Each vehicle would beam GPS coordinates, speed and direction data. Nearby vehicles would receive the data, analyze it with on-board computers, send safety alerts, and engage collision-avoidance systems.

“Cars are getting smarter every day,” says Avinash Salelkar, head of the Manufacturing Business Unit at global IT company Syntel. “Many new vehicles are already equipped with active systems that act in the event of an imminent collision. However, in order for tomorrow’s V2V technology to improve road safety, it is essential that it integrates...

Securecast.com, a security awareness and anti-phishing solution, has deployed a free autofill test tool with updated guidance on how to stay safe in regards to browser autofill features.

The autofill function on your browser is convenient to help complete web forms quickly but did you know that many browsers will autofill hidden fields and provide a lot more data then you may be aware of? Earlier this month a web developer and hacker published how the autofill functionality on your browser such as Google Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera and browser plugins like LastPass can be easily exploited into giving away far more data than you might intend simply by visiting a webpage.

How it works: it starts when an end user visits a phishing site that may look a lot like a trusted website or may be the result of a phishing email directing an end user to a phishing lure page. The webpage will have a simple form or text box where the end user will enter basic data such...

Over half of smartphone users spend no money on smartphone apps (paid-for downloads and in-app transactions), according to a new survey by Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com). However, end-user spending on in-app transactions continues to rise.

"Where users are prepared to pay for apps, spending on in-app transactions is on the rise — up 26 percent from 2015 — while spending on paid-for downloads only increased 4 percent in 2016," says Stéphanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner. In this year's survey, mean spending on in-app transactions was $11.59, while mean spending on paid-for downloads reached $7.67.

Paid-for downloads are more likely to be associated with smaller amounts of spending. Respondents who spent $15 or more over a three-month period were more likely to have done so through in-app transactions. "This is largely because the vast majority of paid-for mobile apps have a price tag of $1.99...

The future growth of the wearable technology market is expected to be driven by consumer preference for sophisticated gadgets, increasing growth prospects of next-generation displays in wearable devices, and growing popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) and connected devices, according to Markets and Markets (www.marketsandmarkets.com).

Applications such as fitness and sports, entertainment and multimedia, and garments and fashion are majorly considered under the scope of the consumer electronics vertical. The increasing demand for smart gadgets and gaming devices for interactive gaming and entertainment is driving the growth of the wearable technology market for the consumer electronics vertical, says Markets and Markets. Headwear and eyewear product segment estimated to grow at the highest rate in the wearable technology market between 2016 and 2022, according to the research group.

The global cloud computing market is poised to grow at a compound annual growth rate of around 27.5% over the next decade to reach approximately $1,250 billion by 2025, according to Research and Markets (www.researchandmarkets.com).

Some of the prominent trends that the market is witnessing include increasing applications of cloud computing solutions and expansion of global players into emerging regions, says the research group. Based on deployment the market is categorized into public cloud, community cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud. Depending on the service the market is segmented by platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).

This Research and Markets report analyzes the market estimates and forecasts for all the given segments on global as well as regional levels presented in the research scope. The study provides...

The global smartphone production volume for 2016 grew 4.7% annually to reach 1.36 billion units in total, according to market research firm TrendForce (www.trendforce.com).

Samsung continued to top the annual global ranking despite the discontinuation of Galaxy Note 7, suffering a marginal decline of 3.3% compared with the 2015 figure. Chinese brands Huawei, OPPO and Vivo respectively occupied the last three spots in the global top five and followed closely behind the second-place Apple.

Samsung had a difficult 2016 in the smartphone market and the company did not achieve its annual shipment target due to the fallout from the battery defect in Galaxy Note 7. Samsung’s global market share also contracted steadily, from 28% in 2014 to 25% in 2015 and then to 23% by the end of 2016. Much of the market share loss was attributed to the stiff competition from Chinese brands across all market segments, from...

DevOps, a philosophy emphasizing collaboration and efficiency among software development and operations teams, still lacks a widely agreed upon definition despite being broadly recognized among IT professionals, according to a new survey report by Clutch (https://clutch.co/), a B2B ratings and reviews firm.

Clutch asked respondents to pick the definition that best characterizes DevOps from four unique options published by Wikipedia, Rackspace, Amazon Web Services, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. While Wikipedia's definition secured the largest percentage at 35%, no definition earned a majority.

Wikipedia's definition states, "DevOps… is a culture, movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other [IT] professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes."

A recent survey conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC) finds that a whopping 84% of U.S. consumers expressed concern regarding the security of their personally identifiable information (PII) and 70% told IDC (www.idc.com) that their concern is greater today than just a few years ago.

The newly published special study, which measures consumer privacy sentiment across four vertical industries (Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail, and Government), also includes the following key findings:

° Younger consumers, those age 18-35, demonstrate a higher concern for their personally identifiable information than do their 36-50 year-old counterparts.

° Hyper awareness and growing sensitivity toward data exposure appear to have consumers on the verge of making serious changes in their behavior.

"The dawn of Digital Transformation has already affected the relationship between individuals and...

Today's typical business intelligence (BI) user increasingly prioritizes mobile, fast, and customizable platform options, and platform providers are feeling the pressure to evolve quickly to meet the demand from customers.

A new survey from Clutch (www.clutch.co), a B2B ratings and reviews firm, finds that 70% of data analytics users consider a mobile application crucial to their use of BI software. Even those users who said they don't consider a mobile application crucial have taken notice; nearly 60% of those users said they recognize mobile BI applications as increasingly important to their business.

User emphasis on mobility has grown significantly in a short amount of time. Clutch's 2016 BI survey found that only 41% of data analytics users even used a mobile phone or tablet to access their BI data—now almost double that number believe mobility is crucial to their use of the software.

New data from Juniper Research (www.juniperresearch.com) has found that the consumer IoT (Internet of Things) installed base will reach over 15 billion units by 2021, an increase of 120% over 2016.

As evidenced at the CES show earlier this month, embedded connectivity is increasingly being used as a product differentiator. Juniper cautioned that the vast scale of this connectivity will, unless action is taken, lead to an unmanageable cybersecurity risk created by botnets in excess of one million units.

Juniper’s latest research found that recent IoT botnets will prove merely to be the tip of the cybersecurity iceberg. Botnets were uncovered as a key factor in the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack ever recorded last year.

The report found that the use of botnets to disrupt Internet services form part of the near-term threat landscape. It predicted that botnets will be...

The global market for smart wearables is projected to cross US$30 billion by 2020, according to a new report from Research and Markets (www.researchandmarkets.com).

Initially, the adoption of these devices was confined to developed countries because of the high cost. However, with the decline in cost, vendors have shifted their focus to developing countries to increase their revenue and market base, according to the research group.

The factors like growing IT spending, rising health concerns, growing popularity of smart wearables among consumers, an expanding smartphone user base globally, coupled with continuously declining prices of smart wearables are anticipated to propel demand for different types of smart wearables during the over the next six years. According to Research and Markets:

American consumers and businesses were overwhelmed by an estimated 29.3 billion robocalls in 2016, based on the YouMail Robocall Index (www.robocallindex.com), the nation's first guide that compiles the scope and location of the worst robocalling hotspots across the country by area code.

This news marks the first time that any source has tracked the nation's collective robocall problem over an entire calendar year. In 2016:

° U.S. phones were inundated by an estimated 2.4 billion monthly robocalls, which equals 79.6 million daily robocalls on average, or 921 robocalls for every second of the year.

° Five major cities were blitzed by more than one billion robocalls each, including Atlanta, Dallas, New York, Chicago and Houston.

° The 15 most egregious robocalling numbers for the year were controlled by debt collectors for banks, phone companies, cable firms or retailers.

The Temkin Group (www.TempkinGroup.com) has published its annual “Product and Relationship Satisfaction of IT Clients,” which rates 62 technology vendors based on feedback from 800 IT decision makers within large North American organizations.

At the top of the ratings, six tech vendors earned average satisfaction levels of 70% or more across the eight areas: HPE outsourcing (76%), Google (75%), IBM SPSS (75%), IBM software (73%), IBM outsourcing (70%), and Dell outsourcing (70%). At the bottom of the ratings, five vendors earned average satisfaction levels below 50%: Trend Micro (42%), Infosys (46%), SunGard (47%), Pitney Bowes (48%), and Cognizant (49%).

"Large enterprises depend a lot on all of these tech vendors, but there's a wide gap in how effectively the vendors meet the needs of their customers," states Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group.

According to IDC (www.idc.com), vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 8.1% year over year to US$8.4 billion in the third quarter of 2016 (3Q16). Ethernet switch continues to be the growth leader, as the market awaits new hyperscale datacenter builds to spur additional growth.

The overall share of cloud IT infrastructure sales climbed to 39.2% of all IT infrastructure spending in 3Q16, up from 34.7% a year ago. Revenue from infrastructure sales to private cloud grew by 8.2% to $3.3 billion, and to public cloud by 8.0% to $5.1 billion. In comparison, revenue in the traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure segment decreased 10.8% year over year in the third quarter.

Private cloud infrastructure growth was led by Ethernet switch at 60.8% year-over-year growth, followed by storage at 9.0%, and server at 3.2...

Transparency Market Research (www.transparencymarketresearch.com) predicts that the leading players operating in the global smart medical devices market held a huge share of 43% in 2015. Apple, F.Hoffmann-La Roche, and Abbott Laboratories have been frontrunners in the overall market, grabbing the undivided attention of buyers with their sophisticated products, according to the research group.

High brand recognition, growing presence across geographies, and strong product portfolio is expected to keep these companies in the lead in the coming few years.
The research report states that the global smart medical devices will be worth U.S.$66.1 billion by 2024 as compared to $33.7 billion in 2015. Between the forecast period of 2016 and 2024, the global market is expected to rise at a CAGR [compound annual growth rate] of 7.8%.

Worldwide semiconductor capital spending is projected to increase 2.9% in 2017, to $69.9 billion, according to Gartner (www.gartner.com). This is down from 5.1% growth in 2016.

"The stronger growth in 2016 was fueled by Increased spending in late 2016 which can be attributed to a NAND flash shortage which was more severe in late 2016 and will persist though most of 2017. This is due to a better-than-expected market for smartphones, which is driving an upgrade of NAND spending in our latest forecast," said David Christensen, senior research analyst at Gartner. "NAND spending increased by $3.1 billion in 2016 and several related wafer fab equipment segments showed stronger growth than our previous forecast. The thermal, track and implant segments in 2017 are expected to increase 2.5%, 5.6% and 8.4%, respectively.

Compared with early 2016, the semiconductor outlook has improved, particularly in memory, due to...

A new report published by Allied Market Research (www.alliedmarketresearch.com) projects that the global home entertainment devices market is expected to reach US$294,969 million by 2022. Video devices is estimated to be the most dominant product type in the market from 2015 to 2022.

Home entertainment devices market includes products and systems that are used in domestic or personal context. The market includes several consumer electronic products such as television sets, video players and recorders, audio equipment, and gaming devices. Over the past few years, there is a significant rise in consumer investments in entertainment products mainly owing to the increase in disposable income and development of innovative entertainment solutions from manufacturers, according to Allied Market Research.

Factors that drive the market are increase in product bundling by vendors, increase in...

Worldwide spending on robotics and related services will more than double by 2020, growing from $91.5 billion in 2016 to more than $188 billion in 2020, according to the newly updated “Worldwide Commercial Robotics Spending Guide” from International Data Corporation (IDC).

In addition to spending data on robotic systems, system hardware, software, robotics-related services, and after-market robotics hardware, the robotics spending guide now includes data on commercial purchase of drones and after-market drone hardware.

"The market for robotics continues to experience tremendous growth," said John Santagate, research manager, Supply Chain at IDC Manufacturing Insights. "This growth is really fueled by a combination of technology improvements, expanded use cases, and acceptance in the market. Innovators in the field of robotics are delivering robots that can be used to perform a broader range of tasks, which is helping to drive the adoption of robotics into a wider...

New data from Juniper Research (www.junipereesearch.com) shows that revenues from smart home hardware and services will reach US$83 billion this year, rising to $195 billion by 2021. This will be generated through entertainment, automation, healthcare and connected devices, according to the research group.

The new research found that home automation and smart appliances will be the two fastest growing segments over the next five years, driven by established manufacturers such as Samsung, Bosch and GE Appliances. The research found that market leaders Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Samsung will further solidify their position by building on current assets such their cloud services and incumbent device bases. Juniper has ranked these companies on product development, breadth of partnerships in the industry, success of their adopted business model, and level of innovation.

Worldwide purchases of 3D printers, materials, software, and related services are expected to total $13.2 billion in 2016. According to a recent report by International Data Corporation (IDC), global spending on 3D printing will experience a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.3% with revenues reaching $28.9 billion in 2020.

The United States will deliver roughly a quarter of worldwide 3D printing revenues throughout the 2015-2020 forecast period while the next three largest regions – Western Europe, Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan), and Japan – combined will deliver more than 50% of total revenues, according to IDC (www.idc.com). While the fastest growth will come from the Middle East and Africa (MEA) and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) regions, Western Europe's strong growth will significantly close the revenue gap with the United States by 2020. In fact, five of the eight geographic regions covered in the...

A new survey by Clutch (https://clutch.co), a B2B IT ratings and reviews firm, found that enterprises strongly prefer Microsoft Azure, while small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) gravitate toward Google Cloud Platform. The survey was conducted in order to gain more knowledge on the "Big Three" cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure.

The trends among enterprises and SMBs reflect the strengths of each platform. "It goes back to the trust and familiarity issues," said Nicholas Martin, principal applications development consultant at Cardinal Solutions, an IT solutions provider. "Windows Server and other Microsoft technologies are prevalent in...

Internet of Things spending grew 17.9% in 2016
Worldwide spending on the Internet of Things (IoT) is forecast to have reached US$737 billion in 2016 as organizations invest in the hardware, software, services, and connectivity that enable the IoT. According to a new update by International Data Corporation (IDC), global IoT spending will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.6% over the 2015-2020 forecast period, reaching $1.29 trillion in 2020.

According to the research group, the industries forecast to make the largest IoT investments in 2016 are manufacturing ($178 billion), transportation ($78 billion), and utilities ($69 billion). Consumer IoT purchases, the fourth largest market segment in 2016, will become the third largest segment by 2020. Meanwhile, Cross-Industry IoT investments, which represent use cases common to all industries, such as connected vehicles and smart buildings, will rank among the top segments throughout the five-year forecast...

The wearable devices industry is now one of the fastest growing segments of the technology sector. According to a research report by CCS Insight (www.cssinsight.com), an industry analyst firm, 411 million smart wearable devices, worth $34 billion, will be sold in 2020, this comparing to 84 million units in 2015.

The wearables market is projected to be worth over US$25 billion by 2019. The industry includes smartwatches, fitness trackers, medical wearables, augmented and virtual reality headsets as well as wearable cameras.

Fitness trackers and smartwatches remain the most popular products in the wearable devices industry. Innovations in technology however may push other products into the mainstream, according to CCS Insight. The wearable medical device market, for example, is getting attention.

Apple might soon enter into the healthcare sector later this year with CEO Tim Cook seeking to...

Worldwide factory revenue for the high performance computing (HPC) technical server market grew by 3.9% to $2.8 billion in the third quarter of 2016 (3Q16), compared with $2.7 billion in the prior-year third quarter, according to IDC (www.idc.com).

Revenue for the first three quarters of 2016 totaled $8.1 billion, up 3.4% from the $7.8 billion total for the same period last year, according to new data from the research group. In 3Q16, strong revenue growth in higher-end HPC server systems was partially offset by revenue declines in lower-priced systems.

Revenue for supercomputer systems priced at $500,000 and up jumped 22.3% to $985.3 million compared with $805.7 million in the 2015 third quarter. For divisional systems priced from $250,000 to $499,000, revenue grew by a similarly robust 22.4% to $568.4 million in the quarter, up from $464.5 million in the prior-year third quarter.

t’s clear that 2016 was probably the worst year ever in online privacy - considering increasingly restrictive surveillance laws of governments around the world, major online hacks - such as compromised accounts of over a million Yahoo users - and authoritarian regimes blocking Internet to restrict the freedom of speech.

So, what can we expect in 2017? Will the trend continue, and will we have to face more Internet freedom restrictions and hacks by criminals? Following are the predictions for 2017 by NordVPN (www.nordvpn.com), a VPN service provider, and some advice on how to protect oneself.
Increased mobile ransomware. With ransomware, a malicious program is installed on a computer that blocks the user’s access to the system or certain files. This block is removed when the user pays the creator of the ransomware, usually in Bitcoins.

Research and Markets (www.researchandmarkets.com( has announced the addition of the "Internet of Things (IoT) 2017-2027" report to their offering. It’s intended to assist investors, participants and intending participants in the value chain including developers and academics, interested government officials and users seeking the truth based on new investigation. The focus is on identifying genuine capabilities and needs from a commercial point of view.

The largest potential applications will be multi-sensor so, for many reasons, component count will increase making cost reduction more difficult. Research and Markets looks at expenditure on IoT enabling technology which currently runs to billions of dollars yearly, mainly coming from governments and aspiring suppliers. However, the research market reveals how most of those reporting these and other IoT figures are puffing their data with things that may never be a part of the IoT scene such as sensor research in general....

According to the latest study released by Technavio (www.technavio.com), the global mobile wallet market is expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 35% during the forecast period.

The application of mobile wallets in retail stores increased rapidly in 2015-2016 as they reduce the operational costs for retailers and increase their revenue. The processing fee for transacting via mobile wallets is much lower than card-based transactions. In addition, mobile wallets used in retail stores offer customers with benefits such as coupons and loyalty points. They allow vendors to easily track and analyze consumer data. Retailers use this information to understand consumers’ demands and give consumers a better shopping experience.

Mobile wallets act as a bridge between the online and physical world. It helps users to improve their purchase decision-making process by giving them an opportunity to compare various...

From artificial intelligence to the Internet of Things (IoT), far-reaching innovations are unfolding in virtually every technology sector around the globe, continuing to change the way consumers, businesses and machines interact while also spurring the next revolution in tech market growth, according to a new white paper from IHS Markit (www.ihsmarkit.com), which specializes in critical information, analytics and solutions for the major industries and markets that drive economies worldwide.

For the white paper, IHS Markit surveyed its leading technology experts, who represent various industry segments including advertising, automotive, connected networks, consumer devices, entertainment, displays, media, semiconductors, telecommunications and others. These analysts were asked to provide their informed predictions for the global technology market in the New Year.

Advances in various technologies will drive users to interact with their smartphones in more intuitive ways, said Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com). The research group predicts that, by 2019, 20% of all user interactions with the smartphone will take place via virtual personal assistants (VPAs).
"The role of interactions will intensify through the growing popularity of VPAs among smartphone users and conversations made with smart machines," said Annette Zimmermann, research director at Gartner.

Gartner's annual mobile apps survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2016 among 3,021 consumers across three countries (U.S., U.K. and China) found that 42% of respondents in the U.S. and 32% in the U.K. used VPAs on their smartphones in the last three months. More than 37% of respondents (average across U.S. and U.K.) used a VPA at least one or more times a day.

A new study from International Data Corporation (IDC) highlights IT spending trends by size class in Western Europe. The study shows that IT spending in Western European SMBs will exceed $130 billion by 2020.

The SMB segment represents a third of the total IT market, despite the relative fragility of smaller companies and their relatively small IT budgets. There will be a downward trend at the start of the forecast period that will bottom out in 2017, but then IT spending will start to increase, albeit slowly.

The study segments IT spending forecasts into three main company size bands: micro-enterprises (1–9 employees), small businesses (10–99 employees), and midmarket companies (100–499 employees). Large enterprises (employing 500 employees or more) are only considered in the study to allow comparisons with the large enterprise segment and with the total IT market.

Small businesses are the most dynamic in terms of growth among the three main size classes,...

Smartphones offering resistance against water damage (and other liquids) grew 45.2% year on year in the first nine months of 2016 in Western Europe, while shipments of non-water–resistant smartphones declined 17% in the same period, acc. Water resistant smartphones reached 22.5 million units in the period to represent 23% of the total number of smartphones shipped in 2016 to date, according to IDC (www.idc.com).

The strong growth in this segment was supported by the success of Samsung and Huawei devices offering this feature and by the recently launched iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, both offering IP67.

Liquid damage is the second-largest cause of damaged smartphones in the world, representing 35% of all devices repaired, according to IDC. This results in significant costs to end users, phone manufacturers, carriers, retailers, and the environment in general. IDC estimates that over 100,000 smartphones get damaged by...

The rapid pace of technological and societal change has given government CIOs a new sense of urgency and a willingness to experiment with smart city and open data initiatives, according to Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com). If managed effectively, this shift will position governments at the core of technological innovation in society, adds the research group.

"As citizens increasingly use personal technology and social networks to organize their lives, governments and businesses are growing their investments in technology infrastructure and governance," said Anthony Mullen, research director at Gartner. "This creates open platforms that enable citizens, communities and businesses to innovate and collaborate, and ultimately provide useful solutions that address civic needs.”

As a result, Gartner predicts that by 2019, 50% of citizens in million-people cities will benefit from smart city programs by voluntarily...

Smart machines will enter mainstream adoption by 2021, with 30% adoption by large companies, according to Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com). Technologies including cognitive computing, artificial intelligence (AI), intelligent automation, machine learning and deep learning fall under the umbrella term for smart machines.)

"The use of smart machines by enterprises can be transformative and disruptive. Smart machines will profoundly change the way work is done and how value is created. From dynamic pricing models and fraud detection, to predictive policing and robotics, smart machines have broad applicability in all industries," said Susan Tan, research vice president at Gartner. "For service providers, smart machines represent opportunities to help enterprises assess, select, implement, change and adapt talent, and for IT and business processes, the opportunity to successfully adopt smart machines for business...

Mail carrier, word processor and meter reader are among the jobs that are fading into obscurity, according to CareerCast's (CareerCast.com) “2016 Most Endangered Jobs Report.”

Disc jockey, jeweler, computer programmer, broadcaster and newspaper reporter, have felt the squeeze of labor market changes in recent years, and face unfavorable hiring forecasts for the years to come. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 28% decline in employment of Mail Carriers by 2024, or a total 136,000-employee loss in the field over the next eight years.
"The field began changing in the early part of the 2000s, as more Americans began communicating through email and text messaging, abandoning the traditional letter when reaching out to friends, family and colleagues," says Kyle Kensing, online content editor, CareerCast. "However, the bigger impact on the postal field's hiring outlook for the future is the automation of sorting and processing.”

New data from Juniper Research (www.juniperresearch.com) has found that the number of connected IoT (Internet of Things) devices, sensors and actuators will reach over 46 billion in 2021. This 200% increase, from 2016, will be driven in large part by a reduction in the unit costs of hardware. Juniper forecasts that it will average close to the “magic” $1 throughout the period.

Juniper’s latest research found that industrial and public services will post the highest growth over the forecast period, averaging over 24% annually. However, the research group cautioned that both providers and end-users will face tremendous challenges when considering IoT deployments at scale.

“The platform landscape is flourishing,” said research author Steffen Sorrell. “However, analytics and database systems are, for the most part, not architected to handle the Big Data 2.0 era that the IoT brings. To that end,...

Latin America’s leading eCommerce platform Linio.com, has released the “2016-17 Technology Price Index” (http://tinyurl.com/zu3xuyl) comparing the cost of 14 popular electronic devices and brands, across 71 countries.

With Christmas shopping season already in full swing, Linio undertook the research to better understand the global economic trends in the price of electronics. The Technology Price Index takes into account the cost of smartphones, laptops, games consoles, tablets, smart devices, and other gadgets, ranking the countries on the average cost of all products researched.

To conduct the research Linio looked at the costs of all products in the study from several brick and mortar chain stores and smaller retailers in all major cities in each country. The study also took into account average costs from at least three reputable online outlets in each country. Taxes and other...

As more smartphone manufacturers build designs using flexible display technology, shipments of flexible displays are expected to reach 139 million units in 2017, an increase of 135% compared to 2016. According to IHS Markit (www.ihsmarkit.com), which specializes in critical information, analytics and solutions, flexible displays are expected to comprise 3.8 percent of total display unit shipments in 2017.

Vivo and Xiaomi launched their first smartphones with flexible active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) displays in 2016, while many other manufacturers have plans to develop their own foldable (or bendable, dual-edge curved) smartphone designs. In particular, Apple is expected to launch its new iPhone using flexible AMOLED display in 2017, which would dramatically drive up expected demand for flexible AMOLED panels. Flexible AMOLEDs are expected to comprise 20% of total OLED display unit shipments...

Organizations spend an average of 5.6% of the overall IT budget on IT security and risk management, according to the most recent IT Key Metrics Data from Gartner, Inc. However, IT security spending ranges from approximately 1% to 13% of the IT budget and is potentially a misleading indicator of program success, analysts said.

"Clients want to know if what they are spending on information security is equivalent to others in their industry, geography and size of business in order to evaluate whether they are practicing due diligence in security and related programs," said Rob McMillan, research director at Gartner. "But general comparisons to generic industry averages don't tell you much about your state of security. You could be spending at the same level as your peer group, but you could be spending on the wrong things and be extremely vulnerable. Alternatively, you may be spending appropriately but have a different risk appetite from your peers.”

Mobile Experts (www.mobile-experts.net) has released fresh numbers and analysis that explain why the wireless backhaul market has started out slow, then how it will rise over the next four years. Fixed Wireless Access is also covered in the annual Mobile Experts breakdown of backhaul, fronthaul, and midhaul for small cells.

To create estimates and forecasts for the Small Cell market, the Mobile Experts analysts rely on direct input from more than 55 industry sources, with an array of mobile operators contributing to the overall analysis. The goal achieved in this latest report is a detailed, global view of the market. Mobile Experts has built a "top down" forecast based on this direct input from mobile operators and based on trends in end-user demand for mobile services, and a "bottom up" forecast through discussions with OEMs and semiconductor suppliers in the supply chain.

The abandonment rate of smartwatches is 29% and 30 percent for fitness trackers, because people don’t find them useful, they get bored of them or they break, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com).

"Dropout from device usage is a serious problem for the industry," said Angela McIntyre, research director at Gartner. "The abandonment rate is quite high relative to the usage rate. To offer a compelling enough value proposition, the uses for wearable devices need to be distinct from what smartphones typically provide. Wearables makers need to engage users with incentives and gamification."

The 2016 Gartner Personal Technologies Study surveyed 9,592 online respondents from Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. between June and August 2016, to gain a better understanding of consumers' attitudes toward wearables, particularly their buying behavior for smartwatches, fitness trackers and virtual reality...

The video software market is expected to exceed US$9 billion in revenue by 2021, according to new data IHS Markit (www.ihs.com). The atomization of media distribution and the switch from hardware-based technology solutions to cloud implementations are key drivers for the $3 billion in revenue growth over the next five years, according to the research group.

“Taken together, these two forces have created a market where value is shifting towards the front end,” said Cecilia Zhu, analyst at IHS Technology. “A superior user-experience has become fundamental to securing increased consumer spend.”
Content security was the largest segment in 2015 Globally, content security accounts for 32% of the digital video software market.

“While demand for robust security solutions is unlikely to deteriorate, particularly in the presence of high-value UHD and HDR content, the segment is effectively saturated,” Zhu said....

A new study examining how the IT service management (ITSM) industry will look in 2030 shows a high level of optimism for the future as service management frameworks become applied across organizations in support of a wider adoption of technology.

The report by AXELOS (www.AXELOS.com) reveals that ITSM professionals see future growth in the industry with 77% agreeing that non-technical business units will be more involved in service governance, service strategy and service design, and the same number believe end user interactions with IT will become simpler, lighter-touch and less complex.

They welcome developments such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning; 77% said they believed these trends would have a profound impact on the IT workforce, liberating ITSM professionals from routine tasks and free up time for responding to demands for more creativity and “human” input.
...

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